Thurs 9/10: Meeting up in Bradford
This is the trip that was almost stolen from us by COVID. For months, as the pandemic raged on, we wondered whether we would be able to pull off a trip at all and whether it would be advisable even to try. But we persevered - over the course of several months we talked out ways to socially distance from each other while camping (in case one of us unknowingly showed up infected) and researched other details (there's a surprising body of knowledge - mostly in the form of Youtube videos - out there about how to do COVID-safe kayak rescues). All along we kept planning, with the Adirondacks as our destination.
Shortly before our trip a monkey wrench got jammed into the works when New York placed into effect a travel ban on residents from 35 states, including Maryland and Virginia. We hurriedly began scouting for alternatives in states without such restrictions and settled on Pennsylvania. For a while we kept planning the Adirondacks and the Alleghenies in parallel, but eventually we gave up on the ADK's and went all in on the Alleghenies, which turned out to be just fine.
Pennsylvania, for all its merits, is not a state with a lot of kayakable wilderness waterways. The plan we came up with was four nights back-country kayak camping on the Allegheny Reservoir, which straddles the NY/PA border in the western part of the states, followed by three nights of camping at Black Moshannon State Park which would include day trips to go paddling.
The drive to our meeting point, Bradford, PA, was a mere five and a half hours, which is short for one of our trips. In COVID times it was a bonus to have a relatively short drive, as it reduced the need to enter suspect rest stops, find meals, and so on. I made the drive easily, with a stop in the parking lot of People's Natural Gas Stadium, home of the Altoona Curve Minor League Baseball team, to eat the lunch I had packed. I had hoped to find picnic tables there, but alas, there wasn't anything available outside the stadium.
Prior to making plans for this trip I had never heard of Bradford, PA, but in a bizarre coincidence, just days after we decided on Bradford as our meeting place the drummer of a band I've just joined posted a whole bunch of pictures from Bradford on Facebook. It turns out his wife is from the area, and thanks to him we arrived with insider knowledge of where to eat and what to do.
We got takeout dinner from "Kabob's (sic) at the Option", recommended by my drummer friend. Bradford, it seems, was a wealthy boom town in the original 19th century oil boom (Pennsylvania was an oil producing state long before anyone thought of Texas as a place to look for oil) and signs still exist of its past prosperity. The "at the Option" part of the restaurant name comes from the fact that the restaurant is housed in the ornate old oil option exchange building. As the oil industry faded, the option house became a restaurant and to this day contains an opulent bar installed in the 1930's. Sadly, due to COVID concerns we didn't eat inside in the restaurant; we took our food to-go in plastic containers and ate on the pool deck at our hotel. After dinner all of us except Tom went to the (also recommended) Bradford Brewery - nice environment (outdoor seating), OK beer, terrible service.
Friday 9/11: Launching from Willow Bay
Friday morning I awoke early. After eating my "grab and go" breakfast from the hotel (COVID era replacement for the breakfast buffet) I headed out to find a nearby geocache, then tried to go with Rob for a more substantial breakfast at a diner in town, only to find it closed due to COVID. We all formed up and drove the 20 minutes or so to our launch point, Willow Bay Recreation Area. While we seemed to take plenty of time getting ready, apparently we were rushing a little bit in that I somehow managed to lose the pair of earbuds I had brought along (nice ones I had just bought!) and Rob ... well, I'll get to that later. while we were packing our kayaks a fisherman coming in warned us to be careful - he does search and rescue on the lake and has plucked out many kayakers in distress. We thanked him and reassured him that we're all pretty experienced. He also welcomed us to the "prettiest place on earth". He clearly hasn't traveled much. Don't get me wrong, the Allegheny Reservoir is a pretty place, but I would say it falls a little short of his billing.
Whenever I launch on a kayak camping trip my first thought when I try to get the fully load boat moving is, "oh boy, this is going to be a haul." It takes a lot of effort to overcome the heavy boat's inertia and get it it up to speed, but in fact, once it's moving it doesn't feel too bad to paddle. We were soon cruising along with a slight wind at our backs helping us along. The reservoir is long, straight and skinny so no sophisticated navigation skills were required and after about six miles we came upon Handsome Lake campground. We had been advised that this campground was often crowded with hikers and was a little bit ugly due to downed trees, but in fact from the water it looked decent and nearly deserted - we spotted one couple there. Despite the attractiveness of the site we decided to continue on to our planned campsite, Hopewell campground, which is less than a mile farther down the reservoir. As we approached Hopewell we could see it was far busier - from a distance we could see a powerboat, a pontoon boat, and a cluster of kayaks on the beach. Some of us thought we should just turn around and go back to the seemingly quieter Handsome Lake, but checking out Hopewell become the trip's first Really Big Deal and so we wound up going there and making the decision to squeeze the six of us into the two available waterfront campsites, which put us in between a group of kayak fishermen and the family with the pontoon boat. This is a little less solitude than we usually aim for, but when you're trying to make a decision among six people, sometimes it's easier to just choose the acceptable place you're already at rather than muster everyone to go to the unknown place you haven't been. Anyway, the campsites weren't bad at all - level, wooded, nice view of the water, and with a picnic table apiece.
The reservoir was quite low so when we landed we had a big rock beach and a liuttle bit of a climb between us and the campsites. The beach turned out to be a nice place to hang out, but it did mean a little bit of a schlep for the gear. We benefited from the presence of old people to get the senior discount (50% off!) on campsites, and after a minor Really Big Deal about how we were splitting up and how many sites we needed, we settled in with Rob, Suzanne and me on one site and Tom, Bela and Jen on the other.
Fitting the six of us into two campsites still gave us room to socially distance from each other, but it did put us in closer proximity to each other than we had expected and I think some of us were a little jittery about the somewhat close quarters. Suzanne ceded the picnic table to Rob and me and staked out her own little sub-section of the site, I think in part (perhaps not even consciously) to maintain her own COVID bubble.
One of our social distancing moves for the trip was to eschew our usual practice of having group dinners and go totally on our own for food. For whatever reason, I decided to go full-on backpacker and prepare compact dehydrated meals. I also had the goal of doing as little dishwashing as possible, so I tried to make most meals in boil-in bags or the like. I can't use the commercial Mountain House style backpacker foods since they're all insanely high in salt, so I decided to roll my own, with decidedly mediocre results - primarily because I threw too much stuff into each meal. Teddy had abandoned various dehydrated foods left over from his distance hiking at our house when he moved, so I was like, "well, if dehydrated chili is good, then dehydrated chili with some added broccoli, mushrooms and kale must be better!" Not necessarily. My first meal was in fact, a black bean chili-ish meal, with fresh cheese and tortillas. Edible, but probably would have been better using just beans and TVP to make a vegetarian chili without the vegetable "mix-ins".
